This invention really represents "thinking outside of the envelope"! And it works on waste heat from factories. M

Man-made tornadoes could power the future

Engineer spins up plan to generate electricity from sucked-up air

By Michael Schirber

Man-made tornadoes could power the future - LiveScience - MSNBC.com



updated 12:06 p.m. PT, Wed., June. 25, 2008
Coiled up in a tornado is as much energy as an entire power plant. So a Canadian engineer has a plan to spin up his own twister and extract energy from its tethered tail.

It all depends on heating the air near the surface so that it is much warmer than the air above.

"You can generate energy whenever you have a temperature gradient," said Louis Michaud. "The source of the energy here is the natural movement of warm and cold air currents."

These so-called convective air currents are only useful if they can be channeled in some way. That is why Michaud proposes using a tornado as a kind of drinking straw between the warm ground below and the cold sky above. Wind turbines placed at the bottom could generate electricity from the sucked-up air.

Whirlwind tour

Tornadoes and hurricanes form when sun-heated air near the surface rises and displaces cooler air above. As outside air rushes in to replace the rising air, the whole mass begins to rotate.

Michaud got the notion of a man-made tornado — what he calls the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) — while working as an engineer on gas turbines.

"When I looked further into it, I didn't run into anything that was impossible," Michaud told LiveScience.

The AVE structure is a 200-meter-wide arena with 100-meter-high walls. Warm humid air enters at the sides, directed to flow in a circular fashion. As the air whirls around at speeds up to 200 mph, a vacuum forms in the center, which holds the vortex together as it extends several miles into the sky.

With wind turbines at the inlets to the arena, Michaud calculates that as much as 200 megawatts of electricity (enough for a small city) could be extracted without draining the vortex of its power.

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National Debt =

Taming tornadoes to power cities


'The amount of energy involved is huge. Once it gets going, it may be too hard to stop'

Prof. Nilton Renno 'Vortex engines' fed by hot water from a nearby power plant could spin turbines, engineer says

Jul 21, 2007 04:30 AM
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Tyler Hamilton
Energy Reporter

SARNIA–A curious-looking wood cylinder with a round opening at the top and a small heating element at the bottom sits in Louis Michaud's garage, bicycles hanging overhead and a workbench pressed against the wall.

The retired refinery engineer picks up a propane torch, lowers it into the opening, and lights a tiny piece of saltpetre. A loud fizzling is heard and a thick smoke begins to rise from the centre.

At first the smoke has no form, but it soon swirls upward into a well-defined vortex – what, on a larger scale, you might call a tornado.

"The air is being drawn in on its own. There's no fan or anything involved," says Michaud, explaining the physics of convection and how rising air behaves like a spinning top. "This is what's going on in the atmosphere. The air is heated in the bottom by the sun and then it rises, cools and comes back down again."

It may seem like a hobby – a home science experiment meant to occupy time during retirement – but this 66-year-old isn't just tinkering.

Michaud has spent the past 40 years studying tornados and hurricanes, and is convinced it's possible to engineer and control powerful, full-scale whirlwinds and harness their energy to produce emission-free electricity.

Forget wind farms and their intermittent operation: the future of electricity generation could be tornado power on demand.

Michaud has adapted this process to create what he calls a vortex engine, and has patented the invention in both Canada and the United States. Recently, he formed a company called AVEtec Energy Corp. with an aim to turning this unconventional – and to many, unthinkable – approach to electricity generation into a commercial reality.

"I'm talking about a 200-megawatt device, which would be 200 metres in diameter," says Michaud. That's enough electricity for 200,000 homes.

"The vortex would be one to 20 kilometres high, and have 10 turbines (at the bottom) each producing 20 megawatts."


The University of Western Ontario's wind-tunnel laboratory, through a seed investment from OCE's Centre for Energy, is studying the dynamics of a one-metre version of Michaud's vortex engine – like the one in his garage. The lab is also conducting computer simulations to look at the impact of cross winds on a 20-metre model.

"When the idea was first brought forward we were like, `tethered tornados,' hmmm ... But we looked at the patent and thought it merited further study," says Nicole Geneau, manager of business development at OCE's Centre for Energy.

"We have a strong history of picking things up that seem like crazy ideas, and at least giving them a shot. We should not stand in the way because of preconceived bias."

On a commercial scale, the plant would require a heat host, such as a power plant, that could provide the vortex engine with a constant supply of hot water "fuel."

Here's how it works: Waste heat, a byproduct of any fossil fuel or nuclear plant operation that is typically vented into the air through cooling towers, is carried by water pipe to a vortex engine facility nearby. The hot water enters a number of cooling cells stationed around the facility where fans push dry air across hot pipes.

The air picks up the heat and enters the vortex through 10 or more angled ducts, causing the air to swirl inside. The heated air begins to rise in a spinning motion, gathering energy the higher it gets and creating a vortex. As the vortex gathers momentum it begins to suck air through the cooling cells, at which point the fans that initially pushed in the air now function as turbines that generate electricity.

As long as the heat is available, the vortex will keep spinning.

Michaud figures that a commercial plant of between 200 metres and 400 metres in diameter could generate 200 megawatts of baseload power and be built for $60 million. But $20 million of that, he points out, would be offset because the power plant would no longer need a separate cooling tower.

Compared to nuclear, even coal, it's a bargain. Michaud estimates that one of his vortex engines would cost less than one quarter the cost of a coal plant, and that's excluding the cooling tower benefits and the fact that no ongoing fuel expenses are needed to keep it going.

Nilton Renno, a professor at the department of atmospheric, ocean and spaces sciences at the University of Michigan, has spent his career studying tornados and water spouts. He says there's no reason why Michaud's vortex engine wouldn't work.

"The concept is solid," says Renno.

TheStar.com | Business | Taming tornadoes to power cities

If you are creating your own tornado, then you can not possibly get more energy out of it then you put into it, 1st law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy.

Now trying to harness power from exsisting tornados would be a different story, with the added side effect, that as it takes energy from the tornado, the tornado will slow down and decrease in size and power, meaning that it will cause less or no damage.

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"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

It doesn't make sense but it works. That's called thinking outside of the envelope. I like the idea that it is taking the heast exhaust from a regular power plant. So we are really talking about cogeneration from regular power plants. That would mean more energy and more profits for the energy corporations and they would no longer need cooling towers. In short, in terms of the power plants we have, more bang for the buck.

I won't pretend to understand all the science behind it, but does a tornado not build up energy as it goes, from outside (what energy I don't know)? Therefore the original energy put in will be multiplied as the tornado goes on.

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Actually, it won't work, because it violates the 1st law of thermodynamics, it is nothing more than a piece to get him some cover and five minutes of fame, like the guy that thought the future was buring salt water.

Also, let's say that this does work by being attached to a power plant for the heat, that will only secure the coal plants as more needed and harder to get rid off as they continue to pour CO2 into the enviroment.

__________________
Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

Yes, it builds it up from the enviroment, but man made ones get their energy from what we give into them, not from the enviroment. The enviroment adds the energy slowly over a long period of time for the tornado to use when it forms.

__________________
Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

Maybe they could use the methane that is produced in land fills to heat the air. There is a landfill just south of the Florida state line that has a pipe coming out of the ground to let methane out. It is continually burning. When you drive by at night the flame is actually quite large. If they could rig something up to capture the heat from the methane being burned it might work out fairly well.

Any thoughts? Right now the methane is simply being burned.

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Ayn Rand, Anthem.

An interesting way of thinking. It sounds like all they need is a consistent heat source and the rest is cogeneration energy. They also burn off residual gas and fumes at refineries and oil rigs.

My goodness, how simple it would be to hook up an engine to that that would do nothing but generate electricity 24/7. It may not be all that powerful, but free energy is free energy. Even if it only comes to a 1 MW generator, that would still be 8,760 MWh a year, and energy sells at about $90 per MWh, so you have nearly $800,000 a year from this, just burning away.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides